TRANSIT STRIKE: SUBTEXT; Race Bubbles To the Surface In Standoff

By DIANE CARDWELL; Sewell Chan and Mike McIntire contributed reporting for this article.

Published: December 22, 2005

The standoff between the Transport Workers Union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, tense and perilous, was already taking a harsh physical and economic toll on New Yorkers.

But now, as representatives of a mostly nonwhite work force trade recriminations publicly with white leaders in government and at the transportation authority, the potentially volatile issue of race, with all its emotional consequences, is bubbling to the surface.

The examples are both blatant and subtle, some open to interpretation, some openly hostile. Regarding the latter sort, the union -- representing workers who are largely minority -- shut down a Web log where the public could comment on the strike after it became so clogged with messages comparing the workers to monkeys and calling them ''you people.'' (Seventy percent of the employees of New York City Transit are black, Latino or Asian-American.)

And what may have begun inadvertently, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Tuesday that union leaders had ''thuggishly turned their backs on New York City,'' took on a life of its own yesterday as minority leaders and union members attacked the mayor's conduct as objectionable, or worse. ''There has been some offensive and insulting language used,'' said Roger Toussaint, the union leader. ''This is regrettable and it is certainly unbecoming for the mayor of the city of New York to be using this type of language.''

But others were more extreme in their response. Leroy Bright, 56, a black bus operator who is also a union organizer, saw racial coding in Mr. Bloomberg's choice of words. ''The word thug is usually attributed to people of color whenever something negative takes place,'' he said, adding that the language was ''unnecessarily hostile.''

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who called an evening news conference to blast Mr. Bloomberg, said in an interview: ''How did we become thugs? Because we strike over a pension?''

''I do not think the language would have been used in a union that was not as heavily populated by people of color,'' he added. ''And whether he intentionally did it or not, he offended a lot of people of color and he ought to address that, and come to the bargaining table.''

Earlier in the day, the Rev. Herbert D. Daughtry, a Brooklyn pastor, joined elected officials at a City Hall news conference and compared Mr. Bloomberg to Eugene (Bull) Connor, the Alabama police chief who used police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protesters in the 1960's.

Ed Skyler, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, dismissed those comments, saying, ''It's despicable for anyone to inject race into this situation.'' He noted that when police and fire union members were trailing the mayor during contract negotiations, Mr. Skyler had accused them of ''acting like thugs,'' to little comment.

But for all the accusations and counter-accusations, clues of a simmering racial tension have hovered over the contract negotiations between the union and the transit authority all along.

Mr. Toussaint, for instance, continued yesterday to cast the strike as part of a broader movement for social justice and invoked the civil rights movement, as he often does in his calls to respect the dignity of his workers. ''Had Rosa Parks answered the call of the law instead of the higher call of justice, many of us who are driving buses today would instead be at the back of the bus,'' he said.

Mr. Toussaint added that he was the one who pointed out that the authority did not honor the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The authority, in its offer on Monday night, agreed to create such a holiday, an action estimated to cost $9 million a year. Indeed, the politics of the strike are in some ways embedded in the broader demographic changes in the city. Mr. Toussaint, who is originally from Trinidad, leads a union, now dominated by blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans, whose members were once mostly of European descent.

''Clearly race is a subtext of much of what has happened in city politics, in the ethnic succession within unions and city agencies,'' said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor at the Baruch School of Public Affairs, who said he saw nothing inherently racial in the use of the term thuggish.

Among members of the Transport Workers Union, however, there is a real and bitter sense that city leaders speak of them differently from members of other unions, like those of police officers and firefighters, whose memberships are whiter.

For instance, George McAnanama, a semi-retired union leader and former transit worker said transit employees have received less praise for their contributions during city emergencies like the 2001 terror attack and the 2003 blackout. ''Whenever there's praise given out we're always the stepchild if we're mentioned at all,'' he said.

Now, that sense of injustice has more fully emerged among workers on strike and is being championed by elected officials from the City Council to Congress. Mr. Sharpton made the civil rights connection explicit, noting that when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, he was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike, a strike also held to be illegal.